


i couldn't be more in love

by wordcatchers



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:47:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21703207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordcatchers/pseuds/wordcatchers
Summary: snippets of paul and john: here and there, now and then, separate and together.
Relationships: Cynthia Lennon/John Lennon, John Lennon/Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney/Paul McCartney
Comments: 14
Kudos: 42





	i couldn't be more in love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seutedeern](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seutedeern/gifts).



> for seutedeern. grateful that i met you through a shared love for this band and these two guys specifically. ❤️
> 
> the lyrics in this fic, and the title, come from "i couldn't be more in love" by the 1975.

**_at the best of times, i’m lonely in my mind_ **

Each drag off his ciggie felt like a fucking piece of his soul was dragged out along with it. It was always the same, smoking in The Dakota. It wasn’t languidly leaning against some entryway into some unnamed building in Liverpool. It was watching Sean, something that should make him happy, and _did_ , bless his beautiful boy, but it’s still missing so much.

Sometimes he thinks he can pinpoint why, but can never bring himself to utter the words aloud.

The phone dangled off the hook; he can afford the international calling fees, but he also can’t.

So he reached out and carefully put it back up, but not without flicking his gaze through the sequence of numbers that would have put him through to Paul. Potentially. If the other man would have taken his call.

“Might have a bleeding heart attack if I did,” he muttered to the walls around him. Sean was asleep, napping away peacefully for now, and Yoko had gone out to handle some money business. Sometimes he thought of trailing along, had during some periods, but he couldn’t be arsed now. As long as he kept in mild touch with what she was doing, make sure none of it went under the table, he couldn’t care less what else she did.

Money had only ever bought him loneliness.

**_but i can find something to show you_ **

**_if you have got the time_ **

John’s playing the notes and chords sequences on his guitar, and he’s got a pen tapping against the underside of his chin. They’re in a hotel during tour, Geo and Ringo are gone down to eat, but they’re putting off joining them until they finish this song. He’s scratched out some ideas, and it’s _almost_ there, but maybe they should take a break.

He glances up at John sitting on the adjacent mattress, and the small growing hunger pangs in his stomach drop away to light a burning fire in his lower abdomen, extending outward in tendrils he can control much better now. He remembers sitting like this years ago, in a much different place. Younger, boys rather than men, dreams piled sky high, making all the time in the world for each other when it came to playing and writing music.

They always had the time for each other. When it was only a bicycle ride away to Mendips, before the great responsibilities and fame they always wished and worked for - not that he doesn’t love what they have now, but what’s a man if not a grown-up boy who yearns for the simplicity of childhood every now and then?

He tosses the pen over towards John, and the guitar quiets.

They’ve got the time, the door’s locked, and the distance is nearly the shortest it’s ever been.

**_why would i rely, on the things that i did right?_ **

Looking out of The Dakota’s windows was one of his favourite pastimes now. He’ll take a chair over towards it, rest his feet on the sill, and simply… watch. Sometimes he’ll sit on the sill itself, curling his legs up so his knees nearly rest upon his chest, rest the side of his head against the glass pane. A record is always on in the background, and Sean plays with his toys. His son will come over and show him drawings he makes, and sometimes John will draw with him.

Crayons made everything in life seem so simple.

“Daddy, look!”

Sean’s at his side, and he’s got a picture of the three of them in… “Central Park, yeah?” They’re somewhat crudely drawn stick figures, but he made out Yoko and himself, and of course Sean’s between the two of them. They’re holding hands and there’s birds flying towards the sun, between stark white clouds.

When Sean ran off again, he left a green crayon in John’s palm. John lifted the crayon towards his eyes: magic mint, it read. Magic. He held it up to the window, and felt years before tugging at him, back towards a Magical Mystery Tour. For all he’d ever said about that damned band he’d created, he still thought about those three blokes.

However much he’d done right, all he could ever dwell on these days was all the opposite. Who cared what he’d done right? Everyone focused on the breakup and if they’d ever get back together; just better if they’d go ahead and say, “Fuck what you _did_ do.”

Hadn’t all those years and albums been enough?

John didn’t realise until it was too late.

He’d broken Sean’s crayon.

He kept breaking things. Who was he to try and mend?

**_she said, “i gave you four years of my life”_ **

Ten years they’d been together. Dating and in marriage, he hurt her over and over. He’d fucked it all right up, with his jealousy and rage, and of course she had gotten their son. Who was Julian Lennon? A son that he worried he’d never get the chance to make up any sort of decent relationship with, that’s what. They spent more time together, and he was trying, he was, but he still worried. He’d already missed so much of Jules’ life.

And when he looked at Yoko, he felt echoes of Cyn in her shadow. He went from wishing he’d met Yoko earlier to wishing he’d never married Cynthia at all, to eventually finding his thoughts drift further back to Paul.

Walking the streets of New York City, he often found himself wondering about wrong places and wrong times. Here, in 1979, in New York City, men fucked other men with hardly a care to what others thought. Of course some were disowned by their blood families, but they found family in each other. They couldn’t marry, but they still loved with every bloody fibre of their beings.

He loved Yoko, he did, he told himself that when it felt threadbare, as it so increasingly did nowadays with the shadows on the walls. They had a son together, and she fit him in so many right places, didn’t she? They could talk for hours on end and never even realize the time had passed, and they’d done it so much before Sean. It was quite right that after Sean, the hours couldn’t pass without having to change his nappy or feed him or rock him to sleep.

But a part of him, something he squashed away, pondered on a different life, a different time. He and Paul walking the streets of New York City, two confirmed bachelor’s living together. If he was feeling extremely fanciful, he included the radical idea of adopting a child together someday. It was this life, this time, though, and he settled into what he did have.

Yet that niggling little daydream never left him.

**_so, what about these feelings i’ve got?_ **

They fuck until they’re sore. John inside him, hips thrusting, fingers intertwining. He’s in a bliss that can’t be described in lyrics, an emotion that can’t be summarised in words, because “love” isn’t enough. The English language, therefore, is a failure.

They finish, and Paul’s still mesmerised post-orgasm. He runs a couple of fingers down the bridge of John’s aquiline nose, taking delight in the smile that appears. John’s eyes are closed, and there’s something about the way the corners crinkle in this state that makes his happiness even more pronounced. Paul moves a few millimetres closer and kisses John again, slowly.

It’s 1975 and they can take their time.

**_we got it wrong, and you said you had enough_ **

Business ruined everything. Rights to songs, to profits, to everything that distanced them from the joy of creating music. They’d been fucked over, but instead of realising the most important thing, he attacked Paul. His best fucking mate.

They never came to physical blows, but shite, it’d come close enough. Sparring words, pushing into walls, daggers into each other’s eyes over what amounted to materialistic rubbish. Ownership, rights, what happened to Paris? One time he’d actually said that out loud to Paul, and he’d never forget the way Paul had fucked him that night.

The way he marked his collarbone, teeth digging in as he rubbed them both, his eyes burning with a fiery desire that both frightened and aroused John.

The way he ravaged his lips, leaving him looking like they’d actually gotten into physical blows. Of course that was a great cover story, no one would question it.

The way he started off without lube, if only for a few seconds until he begged.

Hate sex really was something different. But it hadn’t exactly been hate sex, had it? Paul had switched at some point, easing up, reverting to loving whispers at his ears, gentle thrusts that were teasing at his prostate, driving him absolutely wild at the edges of intense pleasure.

When Paul finished him off, it was terribly tempting to leave his bandmate to masturbate himself to orgasm. He hated that a part of him thought like that. He hated Paul. He loved Paul.

The part of him that loved Paul won out, and he gave him a mixture of a handjob and a blowjob, ravishing in the known truth that he still could make Paul give himself over to this sort of thing. Countless complications had interjected themselves over the years, yet it was 1970 and they were fucking like it was 1961. 

It was as he gazed into Paul’s eyes, his lips wrapped around the head of the man’s cock, just before his best mate came, that John realised he couldn’t have made it this far without him.

He couldn’t live without Paul.

But he could pretend.

**_what about these feelings i’ve got?_ **

**_i couldn’t be more in love_ **

“Now there’s a shot,” he whispers to himself, just before pressing on the shutter-release of the camera. It isn’t one of those instant cameras, so he’ll need to develop the film later, but he feels good about the photograph already.

John’s still asleep. Despite only an hour difference between Paris and Liverpool, they were both bloody exhausted after hitchhiking their entire way here, and he’s only been up for a little while himself. Maybe fifteen, tops twenty minutes. He can’t bring himself to wake John yet, and had to be extremely careful getting out of the shared bed so he didn’t accidentally jostle the other man awake.

He has a few more shots of John asleep on the film roll, but they may not be as clear as the one he’s just taken. Or maybe they’re all shit, but he hopes that at least one is salvageable.

When John wakes a few minutes later, Paul’s already in the shower.

John quips about taking their shower together to save on water, and so he doesn’t end up “freezing me arse off, Macca,” but there’s hardly enough space for himself, let alone another person, and maybe he’s just not sure. He turns the water to lukewarm though, saving John from taking a watery trip to the arctic.

The space of time between when he steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around his body, he thinks he sees John glance at him out of the corner of his eye as he brushes his teeth. He says nothing, though, because as soon as he thinks he sees it, he doesn’t. Paul knows he shouldn’t pay any mind, though; they’ve wanked together before, so what does it matter? A cock is a cock is a cock.

But something feels oddly different now that they’re alone together in Paris.

He feels it grow, that oddly charged emotion, as the day passes, and another few go by before John kisses him in a city where they’re known by no one, barring their run-in with Jurgen. They’re strangers to everyone but each other, and something about it all is perfectly freeing. They aren’t the only men kissing other men, and there’s birds kissing each other here as well.

Years later, it’s the last time he remembers being free to kiss John in public.

**_i could have been a great line_ **

He held the final mixed tape for “Walking On Thin Ice” in his hand, watching the night lights of New York City pass them by as they were driven back to The Dakota. The session had gone bloody amazing, and he felt strangely pleased about his lead guitar work. This was going to be a hit, he knew it. He felt Yoko’s hand wrap around his free one in the back of the car, and a part of him regretted that the world would never give her what it had him; she was ahead of her time.

And yet she’d completely missed what was between him and Paul. Perhaps willful blindness? He could never bring himself to fully admit everything to her, but she knew about the tapes for Paul, and knew he was looking into Madison Square Garden and potentially writing with him again. Sometimes she felt completely unreadable when it came to his old songwriting partner, and he genuinely wondered what was going on inside of her mind.

He had once feared what she might do if he let her know everything; now, all he feared was what might happen to Sean if the entire truth came out. He couldn’t handle losing another son.

Paul loved Sean, and that made John happier than he thought it would. He remembered watching them play together on the floor of their apartment, back when Paul used to come by, before he’d said that stupid shit about calling before he came over, since it wasn’t 1956 anymore, and turning up just wasn’t the same.

He missed when Paul would just turn up now.

But it was getting closer and closer to when he could turn up at Paul’s door instead.

He squeezed Yoko’s hand, and for a moment imagined another hand there instead.

**_i could have been a sign_ **

He was so focused on seeing Sean again that he didn’t realise someone had been wanting to speak to him. “Mr. Lennon,” he’d heard. It was after ten o’clock, for Christsake. He was going to turn around and maybe ask why they were here so late, maybe… 

A shot pierced his ears, pierced his flesh.

_Mr. Lennon._

Another.

_Mr. Lennon._

Another.

_Mr. Lennon._

Another.

_Mr..._

“Mr. McCartney, hi there, we’re with CNN, can we just get a quick question for you?”

“...why was it important for you to come out here today?”

Nearly forty years since John died and reporters still ask the most rubbish questions. He reacts better now, as he’s got nearly forty years more experience and distance from the day, but they still don’t know how to ask the right questions, or better yet, leave him bloody well alone. He supposes he gave that right up when they became famous, but he misses it.

He misses when gun violence was never personally imprinted in his memory.

**_or overstayed my time_ **

This was bloody fucking rotten. Absolute shit. Forty years old and shot and so much fucking pain he couldn’t even properly express it because he could hardly breathe. Can’t breathe. Blood out the mouth, excruciating– limitless pain, and fading.

Faintly nodding to what he hears, trying to comprehend.

Was this really his time?

Walking on thin ice.

He had more he wanted to say, but the words jumbled into—

**_say what’s on your mind_ **

_“Why did this—?” The thought short-circuited._

_Right there, after thinking of Sean - precious, dear Sean - he wanted to see Paul. That’s all._

“What? How?”

He doesn’t want to believe it.

_“Wanna see you.”_

_It was blurring all together._

“A bloody gun?”

He still can’t wrap his head around it. He wants to ring him up. He’s only a phone call away, right? But Linda, bless her, she sets him straight in a way that only has him breaking down in her arms. She’s here.

She’s here and John’s gone.

_I miss_ you.

**_maybe i’ll rely on all the things that made it right_ **

**_because i’d give you all the years of my life_ **

Not everything was terrible. Perhaps he’d realised it all too late, but they’d had so much go right.

Liverpool to Hamburg to Paris to the entire bleeding world.

He curled the telephone wire around a finger as he spoke with Paul. Half-past three at The Dakota, half-past eight in the homeland. The sun was setting somewhere west of Ireland, and they were talking of babies. Yoko was out with Sean, and he was supposed to be working on new music. His fingers had itched for Paul, though; could he admit he missed his writing partner?

\- - -

A quarter past eight and the phone rings. They’ve just been able to settle James down for what they hope will be at least a few hours sleep. He isn’t expecting anyone to ring their personal home line, but someone does.

He’s about to tell off whoever’s on the other end because God forbid the phone wake James up after having so much trouble getting him to sleep…

“Is a Mister Paul McCharmly in?”

_John._ He’s put on his stupid posh impersonation, and he can’t help the smile he cracks at his friend’s voice. It’s been too long since he’s heard it.

He laughs, brightly and freely.

\- - -

He never said to Paul’s face or over the call that he missed him.

Northern men just didn’t do that.

He wrote it instead, right hand flowing across the sheet of paper after he and Paul ended the impromptu call: _Now and then, I miss you / Oh now and then, I…_

The itch was still there; he didn’t know how to finish the lyrics. A part of him wanted to admit, a part loathed the idea of admitting. He needed Paul, in more ways than one.

What was life without Paul by his side? All the years they’d given each other, and he’d give more… all of them, if he could even admit that to himself. 

**_so, what about these feelings i’ve got?_ **

**_we got it wrong, and you said you had enough_ **

**_but what about these feelings i’ve got?_ **

**_i couldn’t be more in love_ **

It’s January 1981, and words from their last conversation run through his head, “Beautiful Boy” playing in the background. It’d been October 9th, 1980: John’s fortieth birthday.

_“You’re a right old bugger now, mate!” he’d said._

_“Oi, fuck off, Macca, shouldn’t you be in bed?”_

_“A right old bugger who’s also a prick, yeah?”_

_“Ah, bugger this, bugger that, bugger me, Paul,” John had replied._

Bugger him he would’ve, if there hadn’t been an entire bleeding ocean between them. He’d reminded John of it that evening, and John had only promised yet again that he was going to come to England in the new year.

_“Mimi will be ecstatic, especially since Yoko’ll stay here. I can’t wait for her to meet Sean.”_

It’s January 1981 now, and John’s gone.

He stands up and takes the needle off the record, falling slowly onto his knees, staring at nothing in particular. Linda’s somewhere about the house, and he should really pick himself up before she finds him like a crumpled mess of a man, but he finds he doesn’t quite care. He does resituate himself, though, back against the bed, legs stretched out on the carpet.

Linda knows everything, and somehow, she’s found it within her to understand.

_“You’re a saint,” he’d said to her one evening while in bed as she spooned him._

She’d refuted it, of course. But sitting here now, sometimes he swears he can see a faint shimmering halo above her head. Somehow he chuckles at the thought, and that’s how she finds him. And somehow his small laughter turns into crying as they meet gazes, then full-on sobbing, and she’s holding him here on the floor, rocking him softly in her arms.

“Oh _fuck_ , I miss him, Linda.”

They’re supposed to do this decade together. Write songs together again, maybe play Madison Square Garden, and God knows what else. He wants it so badly, it feels like his chest is caving in on itself, like he can hardly breathe. Linda keeps him grounded as she rubs circles onto his back with the palm of her hand, pulling him to her as close as possible.

She lets him cry, and he’s deeply appreciative beyond the capability of words to express.

He’s not sure how he’s supposed to get through this year at first, but music saves him again. Music gave him a way to make a living that he fully enjoyed, but more important than that, music had given him John Lennon. Music encompassed their relationship, encircled and enshrouded; a cocoon of safety and endearment.

It’s in his piano and his guitars that he feels John the most. Phantom touches, as if John’s still here, placing his hand on Paul’s as he composes with his instruments, echoes of conversations that remind him of their songwriting sessions together. 

Eventually, he gets to only the first number dialing The Dakota before stopping himself.

Eventually, he stops writing John’s name in the margins of some of his half-formed lyrics.

Eventually, the dreams about him lessen, and he doesn’t wake with wet eyes.

Never does he forget the way John used to hold him after they’d made love. They switched positions regularly, but he most treasures the times that he’d held John around his waist afterward. He doesn’t forget placing kisses all over John’s shoulder blades, doesn’t forget John partially turning his face back toward him, murmuring words they never said at any other time.

_“You’re a soft lad, y'know that?”_

_Paul snorts, then presses a kiss to John’s shoulder. “Says the other soft lad.”_

_John nestles even closer to him, his back pressing up against Paul’s stomach. He snores dramatically, feigning fast sleep, as if he hasn’t heard himself called soft. Paul clucks his tongue, grabbing John’s hands in his own._

_They say nothing for what feels like minutes, until John turns his head slightly, breaks the silence._

_“Love you. Git.”_

_Paul mmms, returns the words in kind._

He says them, over and over and over, in song now, because he can’t go without. Even though John isn’t here to hear them anymore, he has to let people know.

They love each other.

**Author's Note:**

> rest in peace, john. you're missed.


End file.
